#anyway back to the history book

[ur-local-catladyy]

The day I’ll menage to focus on a textbook for more than 6 minutes straight is over for you bitches

[cupids-fiction]

she henry on my winter till i bacchanal

[trix1erose]

golden hour in the office

(plus line art + flat colours + only shading under the cut)

[booksandothersecrets]

Dedication of Maurice by E.M. Forster // Sappho // The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall

[entropyvoid]

Golden Hour (+ lineart below cut)

I took a picture of the lines for once and did some basic crappy photo editing on my phone, so you could probably print this out and use it as a coloring page or something if you so wish lol. Do with it what you will.

[mearcatsreturns]

I have a bookstagram, and I recently followed someone because they posted about the overconsumption issue that most bookish social media seems to have. Today, though, they posted another controversial "opinion": that listening to audiobooks isn't reading, and people who claim to have read a bunch of books that they listened to as audiobooks are lying and/or deluded. Listening to audiobooks, she said, is just consuming books.

I disagreed in a fairly politely worded reply, and I intend to unfollow/block, because I find it unlikely this person will change their mind, especially since I'm far from the only person to point out that this is exclusionary and ableist. But this is tumblr/my house, and now I'm going to be as blunt as I want to be.

I'm a librarian and archivist. So much of the work I and others in my field do focuses on making books and reading more accessible and less exclusionary. It is, in fact, incredibly ableist to negate how important audiobooks are for people who have certain disabilities or challenges, and I would in no universe say they aren’t reading. For that matter, a busy person who only has time for audiobooks and for people who just prefer them--it still counts, as far as I'm concerned.

See, there's a difference between an audiobook and a podcast or long song or radio program. An audiobook is still a book--it was written with a particular narrative structure, and the author plays a defined but limited role (once the book is written, it's written; the author isn't tuning in next episode with comments and corrections based on what listeners said). An audiobook is a book, ergo, listening to one is reading. Using braille is reading, and listening to audiobooks is reading.

The part that has me in full Captain Raymond Holt "apparently that is a trigger for me" mode is that this bookstagrammer called listening to audiobooks consumption. In the context of her other posts about overconsumption as an issue in the bookish community (again, agree, but also...mind your own business), this seems particularly insidious to me. Conflating influencer-driven (and capitalist hellscape) consumption with listening to an audiobook (again, a massive boon for the visually impaired and those with disabilities like ADHD, dyslexia, etc.) is rude at best and dangerously exclusionary at worst. Stop letting comparison be the thief of joy; mind your own business and stop looking at the pages that bother you. Focus on the kindness of leaning towards inclusion, meeting people where they are, and leaving judgment behind.*

*This person also said "feel free to comment if you disagree but please don't be mean or judgmental," as if they hadn't just posted the most ableist and judgmental sludge I've seen today.

tl;dr: don’t be a gatekeeping shithead, mind your own business, and

(gif by matalyn on tenor, couldn't find on tumblr)

[hooked-on-elvis]

Elvis Presley onstage at the Las Vegas Hilton showroom, Las Vegas, NV, on September 3, 1973. Credits: pictures from the book "Elvis: Caught In A Trap" by Arjan Deelen and Laurens van Houten (1973 Elvis concert photobook). Pictures taken by photographer Laurens van Houten.

[dazais-guardian-angel]

Well, at least Fukuzawa got his wish granted, I guess.... he's finally inside Fukuchi <3

[goosegirlandfalada]

I was thinking about why Carry On works for me when typically I like minimal exposition! I like being dropped into a story and figuring it out as we go along. Some of my favorite books are like that. And a lot of Carry On is spent on the past, musing over memory & history. I think it works for me because it feels very grounded in the Simon’s personality and emotional experience. He truly doesn’t believe he has a future… so of course he treads over the past.

That’s part of why it works for me: it feels emotionally honest.

In the story, this backwards focus serves several purposes: it orients us at the end of the heroes journey (think of your life flashing before your eyes before you die) and it builds up the color and weight of Watford & by extension the world of magic. It suspends us in Watford’s history & Simon’s longing. Which I think creates a nice tension w the end, we’ve spent the book thinking about Simon’s story and what it means for him that he has lived this life and how it seems totally at odds with a future. And we know that he loves magic, we feel it viscerally in his descriptions. And then he loses a heroic end AND a life with magic. He gains a future but it’s not any kind of future he might have imagined. This then carries us into the next books where things are so radically different, which for all their sadness feel more hopeful than Carry On lol

*(and the rest of the series but i have a whole other list of things I love for those)

[itsybitsybatsyspider]

i would say one of the most neurodivergent moments in my life was in 7th grade history when we were taking a little quiz on Ancient Greece and an extra credit question our teacher gave us was 'Name 3 Greek gods'

and boi let me tell you

I took that instruction and ran with it and kept listing Greek gods until i had filled up the whole back space and we ran out of time in class. There was honestly like 30 names or something that i had listed. I was so excited for that test and that segment in our curriculum because i could finally talk about my hyperfixation and use it to get a good grade, like it was easy as fuck.

and then later i had found out that my teacher had came up to my mom one day and told her that i had listed some gods that even he didn't know about.

obviously i got the extra credit and the vindication was worth it

[uncanny-tranny]

Something kind of funny I never anticipated about crocheting with longer hair was pulling out a piece of my own hair out of my project that I somehow crocheted into it

[nightjarring]

Actually listening to the ASOIAF books has made me start to think that people who treat this series as the ultimate example of Bad Gross Male Fantasy Writing might actually just be stupid.

Idk how you read these without taking note of the fact these books are explicitly about people who are othered by the incredibly harsh, rigid society they live in. The vast majority of the perspective characters are disadvantaged in some way, most of them are either physically disabled, women, or otherwise socially outcast, or some combination of those things. The books so far are an incredibly detailed exploration of the intersection of privelage and disenfranchisement and I am actually annoyed at all the people giving writing advice who bust these out as the ultimate What Not To Do bad icky no-no series.

[badolmen]

make all the blue hair and pronouns jokes you like because it was unequivocally badass when that girl who was arrested last week ripped off her kufiya and mask at our unpermitted, unlawful assembly rally the other day and screamed that she wasn’t afraid of you, you’re the ones that are afraid of her: a 100lb, blue haired, pronoun using queer girl who won’t be intimidated into silence.

[nereb-and-dungalef]

I keep drinking coffee thinking it's gonna make me Productive and then instead of doing the work I actually have to do I just compulsively make spreadsheets :(

[fatehbaz]

.

[campgender]

a Black fem (Arlette) & stud (Jodi) on racism from white butches & fems in the 1950s

from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis (1994)

excerpt 1:

“When we started going in there, we found out how really prejudiced other white gay kids were. They didn’t even want to talk to us, and they looked at us with resentment. … Well at Bingo’s we would always sit in a booth. They would have the bar, a lot of them would look at us and roll their eyes. So we decided that we were going to get some of these to be our friends no matter what we had to do. One thing that drew them was the fact that we would get up and dance. Then some of them would say, ‘Hey, I like that, teach us how to do that.’” (Arlette)

excerpt 2:

Jodi remembers that the presence of Black studs made many white butches nervous: “Some of the stuff that happened was so typically racist, it was so ridiculous. I mean it was like Black studs were coming into the bar, people would just kind of put their arm around their women … [as if] they were just coming in there to snatch up their women.”

excerpt 3:

White lesbians also attended [house parties] but not in large numbers. This was resented by those Black lesbians who wanted a racially mixed community. “White kids started coming. Now they come up with, ‘that neighborhood,’ which I resent. Because there’s no such neighborhood that anybody’s gonna attack you. I get mad at that. ‘Well where do you live? I don’t want to come over there.’ What do you mean you don’t want to come over there?” (Arlette).